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Tuesday, 16 May 2017

Extending Our Intelligence: The Coming Era of Binary Sapience

Our disembodied extensions of our brains are set to become smarter and more closely linked with us

Our phones and other computing
devices are more or less passive creations, bound at every step to
man's programming. Now, however, they are becoming more and more
responsive to us. More anticipatory towards our various needs, subtle
tastes and wants; they are becoming more intelligent.
What does it mean for humanity exactly? How far can we take this?

If
an intelligent algorithm can read and classify your current mood, and
map your different mood swings over the course of a day through
different data inputs with a higher accuracy than your spouse, could it
be used to subtly use that data to make your mood better? Is such a
state of affairs desirable, assuming it is possible given current
technology. And what of that data anyway?

A broad personal
artificial intelligence (AI) suite, perhaps more powerful and capable
than anything our current best could one day be set lose on every
individual on Earth to map out what makes them tick exactly (the data
profile on each individual could be worth quite a lot of money to say
the least), and then actively engage with them to achieve a desired
individual state for each person as set by themselves (or others?). Such
a machine could become the sort of ancillary intelligence we see in
many works of science fiction; a true intelligence that will allow each
person to understand themselves COMPLETELY, and then proceed in
assisting us to make ourselves better than we can possibly ever be on
our own, or even with the help of HUMAN professionals.

An individual human will cease being a single intelligence, but will
instead become a binary intelligence, with the personal machine
significantly expanding our cognition and identity at an almost
subconscious level, while itself advancing itself via software upgrades
and learning.

We can imagine a remote future where a newly born
child is assigned such a personal intelligence the moment he or she is
born. The intelligence will observe his development and consult the
corpus of our knowledge to extrapolate the future possibilities of this
child's personality and behaviour, to better understand how to manage
them as he/she grows up.

Meanwhile, the child's parent's own
intelligent aides can be synchronised with their child's, to enhance not
just their parenting experience, but to enhance the way the literally
think about their role as parents. We can keep going; we can even
imagine training AI to school children (a personal tutor from the
future). Given the knowledge these AIs will have access to, it is
reasonable to assume that they will probably evolve to become the best
tutors, or at the very least, tutor-student aids possible.

Why
should any of this be desirable? Why would anyone want to create
machines that not only replace humans in a variety of high level skilled
tasks, but also become a very part of our very being. And we haven't
gone into the ethics of the data used produced in the meantime. But make
no mistake, we're heading in that general direction very fast. And the
reason is painfully obvious.

While human beings are versatile in
terms of initiative and creativity, we don't scale very well in the
realm of perfect recall, infinite patience, logic, reasoning, et cetera.
Obviously we will need tools to give ourselves these superhuman
abilities. And of course, sometimes we might need something to light our
way forwards, like when a writer has writer's block and needs a dose of
much needed inspiration from his personal intelligence aid. The more these tools actively interact with us, the better we'll
become at handling not just the modern world, but ourselves as well.

However,
we shouldn't kid ourselves. Advancement comes with risks. The Wanna Cry
worm that rocked the world over the weekend demonstrates not the
fragility of our systems, but the fragility of our ability to get a grip
on our systems. Our minds are the weak point (which the hacker knows
and exploits), and at the same time our strongest point. We evolve
through experience, and in this century, the sum total of our
experiential knowledge is more accessible and more voluminous in scope
and depth than ever before. It would be folly to not add on an extra
layer of thinking cortex, our exocortex in the form of actively engaged, thinking machines to ourselves in order to make efficient use of our species' knowledge vault.